


Where the Heart Is

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Adoption, All Ur Fave Are Gay, F/F, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-11-14 19:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11215029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: "When God closes a door he opens a window," isn't exactly on the curriculum at St Agnes, but when Skye is kicked out of yet another foster home, little does she know that she's about to cross paths with an opportunity greater than she could have imagined.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Pride everyone, I hope you like your found families Extra Gay this time of year :D
> 
> I'm still accepting prompts in the comments or on tumblr (@theclaravoyant) but be aware I've got quite a backlog so it may take me a while to fill them.

There was always a place at Mack’s with her name on it, the manager had told Skye once. She’d been grateful for it at the time, but never more than in this moment, as she hissed and swore at her computer screen and its crappy wifi and everything that her day, so far, had been. She had a backpack, a duffel, and her computer bag surrounding her like rounded wagons; all her belongings in the world not even reaching the other side of the booth. She had a table at Mack’s with her name on it, and not much else except the tears running down her face. 

“Shit- fuck – _shit!”_ she muttered, wiping furiously at her tears and raking her hair back in one hand. Lincoln was out of town, Fitz and his mother barely had enough room for themselves, and Jemma was probably having her own ass handed to her right at this very moment. Mack had his daughter to think about, and Skye had way too much damage to bring herself to taint their lives with hers. She dragged her hands down her face, all the guilt and fear and panic combining into bitter-tasting, gut-wrenching shit. 

“Can I help you?” 

Skye was almost feeling too bad to be ashamed as she looked toward the source of the voice. It was an older woman, Chinese like her – and American-born too, by the sound of things. She looked… not emotionless, exactly, nor uncaring. A little bored, perhaps, and more than a shade judgemental, Skye would say, about the tirade of curses she’d ben muttering for a while now. She took a moment to wonder why one of the staff hand’t asked her to be quiet or to leave, before she realised that the woman was still standing there.

“Sorry,” Skye said. “I got – I got kicked out again, that’s all, from this foster home place, and normally I’d crash at my friend Hunter’s but he’s got this new asshole landlord so I can only ask maybe one night out of him and everyone else I know can’t help so basically I’m fucked and I’m going to have to go back to St Agnes and then I’m _really_ fucked and –“

The woman’s facial expression had barely changed. Maybe it wasn’t the swearing she’d hated, Skye speculated. Maybe it was just words.

“Sorry,” she said again. “Thanks for your concern but basically, unless you’ve got a spare room I can have for – well, pretty much free at this point – no, you can’t really help I don’t think.” 

Skye turned her attention back to her computer screen, and to the swarm of Facebook messages that announced disappointment after disappointment. She closed the page and opened another blank one. There must be some kind of work-sharing, noticeboard exchange site that would help her out, surely. But what would she find there? Would she be willing to – what was it called, ‘bang for roof’? Was that even legal?

“Why’d you get kicked out?” 

Skye jumped. 

“ _Je-_ sus!” she exclaimed. The unflappable Asian woman was still there. Her odd, hard-to-read expression mad Skye want to spill all her secrets. She was homeless and crying in a diner anyway; what did she really have to lose? 

“I had sex,” Skye confessed. “In their house. With a girl.” She shook her head. “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure which part bothered them, but I know what I’ll be hearing from the nuns about.”

She rolled her eyes, and put a smile on it. The stranger’s face changed. It was hard to tell, moving from one emotion to another on such a small scale, but there was something in it, Skye was sure. And it was something that, bizarrely enough, made her feel hopeful. 

The woman took a pen out of her pocket, reached for a napkin, and wrote down an address. 

“My name is May,” she said, sliding the napkin to Skye. “There’s a room here, if you want it.”

Skye felt her stomach twist. Her instincts made her want to trust May, but they’d also let her fall in love with the last place she’d stayed, and she’d been all but chased out over the threshold just now. Clearly her radar was off. At least on www.4-let.com she knew she could trust that sketchy feeling.

But when she looked up to decline the offer, May was gone.

-

She wasn’t sure what made her keep the napkin. Desperate times called for desperate measures, she supposed. For whatever reason though, it wasn’t long before it was playing on her mind again. Skye lay wide-awake on Hunter’s couch, staring up at an old, familiar stain on the roof. She’d spent many a comforting night on this couch, but this one seemed to get longer and harder as it went on, as if the bed and the roof were screaming at her in a language she could barely understand, that tonight was the last night she would even have this. 

Unless.

The hairs tingled on her arms. It almost felt like the napkin was whispering to her, keeping her up until, at some point, she must have drifted off because she did remember waking, and what was there to wake from if not sleep? She felt about as fresh as the towels in Hunter’s bathroom, but nevertheless, she did manage to drag herself to the kitchen for a coffee and a bagel. Munching on one of the small joys she still had left in life, Skye pulled the napkin out of yesterday’s jacket pocket. It no longer seemed so menacing in the daylight, but for that unsettling feeling of wanting to trust it that came over Skye again.

Desperate times, she reminded herself, and took a picture of the napkin with her phone. On the sheet itself, she scrawled: 

_In case I get murdered, I’m at this address.  
If you haven’t heard from me by 5pm, call me, then call police._

Being back at Agnes was better than being dead, after all. Skye capped the pen with a short, sharp, satisfied sigh. That was it now, she thought. She’d committed, to the visit at least. No backing out. 

It was with this attitude – albeit a little battered from her shift at work – that Skye got off the bus later that afternoon in front of an old blue and white colonial, behind a low brick wall and a slightly scrappy garden. She let herself through the gate and took a deep breath as she approached the door. It certainly felt like finding a new home, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. And, she recalled, it was the middle of the afternoon. If May had any kind of regular adult life, there might not be anyone home after all.

Skye was contemplating bailing when a smiling face appeared from around the corner of the house. It was another woman, a little younger than May, with short flame-bright red hair. She carried a small potted plant in one hand and a trowel in the other, which Skye thought was a little odd given the state of the garden, and in the middle of the day, but it was not the strangest thing she’d ever seen. Certainly not as strange as giving a crying girl in a coffee shop your home address. 

“Hi,” greeted the woman. _“Ni hao.”_

“Uh, hi,” Skye greeted eventually. “Sorry, I don’t – I don’t speak much Mandarin. I’m a California girl.” 

“What brings you to these parts then, hm?” the woman asked. 

“I’m looking for May?” Skye pulled out her phone and showed the woman the photo of the napkin. “She gave me this.” 

The woman smiled fondly at it. 

“Alright then. Come on in, I’ll give you the tour. I’m Natasha by the way. Call me Nat.” 

“Skye.”

She followed Nat inside and was shown around; upstairs, downstairs, the bathrooms, the kitchen. When they got there, Nat offered her a drink, and started making coffee before she could answer. 

“Any questions?" 

Skye was distracted by the pictures on the fridge. This was definitely May’s house. In fact, judging by some of these photographs, it was May _and Nat’s_ house. Skye smiled, feeling her heart clench at a particularly domestic shot of the two of them: a younger couple, in front of their home – _sold! –_ and both of them with matching smiles, broad and toothy, and with their arms around each other, as if they’d been laughing before the shot or about to collapse into it. It felt like such a distant dream, that she could be that happy. It was heartening beyond what she could have imagined, to feel that happiness – and so much more – in the bones of this house. 

Nat sidled up beside Skye, smiling to herself. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” Skye said, blushing a little as she turned away from the fridge and accepted the coffee Nat held out. Nat shrugged. 

“We wouldn’t keep them on the fridge if we didn’t want visitors seeing,” she explained. “And it’s not like you wouldn’t figure it out, if you moved in. We like to get any awkward questions out of the way early.”

Skye nodded. “I can appreciate that.” 

“May tells me that shouldn’t be a problem with you though, should it?” Nat raised an eyebrow, the implication so unavoidable that Skye blushed a little. 

“I guess not,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t bother you?” 

“Only after 9pm on a school night.” 

Skye snorted.

“And you’re telling me I can stay here – for as long as I want – for free?”

“As far as we’re concerned? Absolutely. Legally? That’s a different matter. Fortunately, we have a lawyer coming to help us out. May’s with her now.”

“You knew I was coming?” Skye wondered. Nat smiled cryptically. 

“May did.”

“How? Even I didn’t know I was coming ‘til this morning.”

“Yes you did,” Nat replied simply. Skye raised her eyebrows, but drank her coffee. It was a stranger day than she’d been expecting, but she knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

There was a knock at the door and then it opened, and a tall dark-haired woman with a face that reminded Skye of an eagle marched through it enthusiastically, tailed by May, who was even smiling a little. She knew Skye would be here, and she knew that Skye would be impressed that she’d been anticipated. 

“This is Maria,” Nat said, gesturing between them. “This is Skye.”

“Maria Hill,” the other woman said, holding out her hand. Her suit and stern features gave Skye the impression that she’d be just as straight-laced as May, but there was a sparkle of amusement in her eyes. “Ace attorney. Welcome to Nat and May’s Forever Home for Wayward Gays. It’s nice to meet you.” 

Skye blinked, confused, and forgot the actual shaking part of the handshake for a moment.

“Forever what-now?” 

Nat groaned. May rolled her eyes.

“Nothing,” Maria brushed her off with a cheeky shrug. “It really is nice to meet you. It’s just, these two get me around for custody stuff fairly often, that’s all. There’s often sensitive issues at play and it’s nice to have somebody from, you know, ‘the community’ on the case.” 

“You’re – I mean you’re –“ Skye glanced at the photograph on the fridge. “Too?”

Maria shook her head.

“Ace, baby, all the way. But we take all sorts here.” 

“Really?” It was not lost on any of them, the way Skye’s face lit up, and she blushed a little. After so many years being raised by a stifling church, and their network of often-just-as-stifling foster applicants, this was starting to feel like a whole new world. And she thought of Jemma, and if that went wrong, and of what if it did and they could live here, together, in this little piece of freedom. And even if they couldn’t – which would be good, of course, if Jemma could stay with her family who loved her – Skye could feel herself breathing easier here already.

May pulled something out of her pocket, and put it on the counter. A key. 

“It’s yours if you want it,” she said. 

Skye didn’t have to be asked twice.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skye and Jemma reunite, and Skye invites Jemma to the Home.

_I’m here._

Skye bit a nail. She’d sent the little bubble a few seconds ago - it didn’t even have a counter underneath it yet – but still, she couldn’t help bouncing her leg. What if Jemma never wanted to speak to her again? What if her parents had caught her and banned her from coming here? What if she’d left the country? What if – 

“Skye?”

That voice. Skye knew that voice. She loved that voice. 

Her lips moved, wanting to call out in response, but Skye found herself speechless, breathless, at the sight of Jemma’s dusky pink coat and windblown hair in the doorway of Mack’s. It was a long moment - stretching slower and slower in time - until Jemma’s eyes found hers at last. Then, in an instant, time caught up. Skye only just managed to scramble out of her seat as Jemma flew across the room to wrap her in a tight embrace. It was firm and lingering; a little more so than they might usually have risked, but it was a special occasion, after all. A victory. It had only been a few days since they’d last seen each other, but given that their last encounter had ended in being dragged apart and drowned in shouting, they were keen to appreciate each other in the flesh once more. Skye inhaled a deep breath of Jemma’s peaches-and-cream shampoo to savour before she finally released her, and even then, Jemma clung to the sleeves of Skye’s jacket, as if to stop her being torn away again. 

“I heard what happened.” The words tumbled from Jemma’s lips, her eyes flitting all over Skye’s body. “Are you alright? God, I feel so stupid, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-“ 

“Hey, come on,” Skye objected, taking Jemma’s hand as gently as their anxieties would allow. “It takes two to tango. And I’m really good actually. Screw the Robinsons, you know? I’m in a good place now.” 

Jemma eyed her suspiciously. “You’re not living at Hunter’s again are you?” 

“No.” Skye shook her head, and led Jemma into the booth as she told the story. “Actually, I was hiding out here after… well, you know… and – to be honest I was having a pretty shit time, not gonna lie - but anyway _then_ this random Chinese lady, May, comes up to me, out of nowhere, and offers me a place to stay. Room and board. Super cheap; it’s like, 20 bucks a week.” 

“Why?” Jemma frowned. Skye shrugged.

“Her and her wife, they’ve got this place they let poor struggling gays stay at,” she explained. “I’ve got my own room and everything. It’s so awesome. Seriously, you did me a favour - well, two favours.”

Skye’s smirked a little, and Jemma blushed, but lowered her eyes. She hadn’t expected their night of frivolity to have such severe consequences, and even though Skye didn’t seem that troubled by it – not hiding too much pain under that comedic exterior – Jemma couldn’t help but feel guilty for her ignorance. All she’d got was a stern talking-to, and even that she suspected was at the request of Skye’s foster parents. She’d been more in trouble for making her parents seem like they were raising an unruly daughter, than for anything unruly she’d actually done. If fate – if this May woman – had not intervened, who knew where Skye might be now? 

“Babe?” Skye frowned, and elbowed Jemma playfully. “I’m fine! I promise. In fact - you should totally come ‘round!” 

“I can’t,” Jemma told her. “I’m grounded.” 

Skye snorted. “Where do your folks think you are then?” 

“The library.” Jemma blushed, chagrined at the believability of such a caricature of an excuse. “Fitz and Bobbi are covering for me.” 

“Well, come on then!” Skye gestured toward the door. “How often is this opportunity going to come up in the next – how long are you grounded for?” 

“Three weeks.” 

Skye screwed up her face. She’d had worse – and for the most part, she hadn’t let them stop her – but she knew that the sneaking around could be stressful, especially for someone much more… obedience-inclined, like Jemma. She took a deep breath. 

“Come on. Please?” Skye begged. “You’re already playing hookie. You might as well commit. Make the most of Fitz and Bobbi’s cover. It’s not even that far away!” 

Jemma bit her lip, but her fingers were twirling and twining with Skye’s on the wood of the table between them, and she couldn’t resist. Not after the ache she’d had in her chest these last few days. So she agreed, and tried to shrug some of the weight off her shoulders as Skye led her to the bus, and to the house, and to her bedroom. 

“It’s…” 

Well, it was nothing spectacular. It was a bed, and a desk of questionable structural integrity, and a dresser. It was décor from somebody’s grandma’s house, dressed up with bits and bobs that other girls had left behind. But it was Skye’s, and she beamed proudly as she followed Jemma’s curious wander through it, and then through the rest of the house. They finished up in the kitchen, and Skye boiled the kettle - on the stove, rather than an electric plate, which seemed to sell Jemma on the place at last. While they waited, Jemma’s eyes drifted over the pictures on the fridge. There was one of Skye already up there, raising a glass of wine in what appeared to be a slightly drunken celebration, with another woman in a button-up and a pixie cut.

“That’s Piper,” Skye explained. “She’s in the Navy or something, so she’s not around much these days, but she’s super cool. I haven’t met the other girls yet. Apparently Raina’s kind of a bitch, but - ” 

She shrugged, still smiling a little dazedly. It warmed her heart to think of how many people had found a home here, even if they weren’t necessarily the warmest or softest of people. Neither was she, of course – and if she were being honest, neither was Jemma, despite the fact that at that very moment, Jemma was almost tearing up at the sight of her. Skye had long since poured her heart out to Jemma about the years of loneliness, uncertainty and rejection she had faced, and come to fear, as she was shunted here and there by the foster system. The contrast filled her heart to bursting, as she watched Skye dance around the kitchen in an untouchable, easy bliss. It was like she’d been there her whole life; serving Jemma tea and a biscuit like they were her own to give. Maybe they were, with a rent of just $20 a week, but still. 

“I’- I’m really happy for you,” Jemma managed at last. “You look so…” 

Fruitlessly, Jemma gestured with her hands. Happy? Comfortable? Home? Skye smiled fondly, and pulled her in by her hips for a quick kiss, and to drink in her presence. In her kitchen. Right now, in this moment, she felt completely in control of her life, and like it could go anywhere, both at once. Jemma rested her forehead against Skye’s and took her hands, holding them gently together.

“I just love you, that’s all,” she said. Simple and complex at once, it was the only way she could think to describe what she was feeling. 

“You’re such a sap,” Skye teased, her words dripping with love, and more than a little sappiness of their own. She kissed Jemma’s forehead as she stepped out of her embrace. “Up for some telly?”  
  
Jemma rolled her eyes at Skye’s accent – which was, though Jemma hated to admit it, getting better – and followed her into the lounge room. All of a sudden, she felt a different kind of lump in her throat. 

Skye felt no such thing. Here, she was in a haven, and even more so now that Jemma was here too. With warm drinks and a thick blanket to cuddle under, she was expecting a quiet night of enjoying safety, comfort, and most of all, proximity. In all honesty, she wasn’t looking to get handsy again at the minute – in fact, she’d have been perfectly happy if Jemma had picked this moment to pull out the homework she’d been using as a cover story and insist on doing it for real. Happier than she was with… this, at least. 

This – what? It was not the cold shoulder. Not anger, or guilt. It was just Jemma, sitting a foot away, so carefully it was as if she’d measured it, and padding the blanket down between them to get out the air bubbles instead of pressing both of their bodies into one space. It was Jemma’s fingers clawing at her mug quietly, and her back, ramrod-straight, even though her face wore a bright smile.  
  
“Oh, I love this programme!” she insisted, and began chattering away about the giraffes on the screen as if nothing was wrong. Except that it was. And _it_ was that inexplicable foot of space. 

(They’d been dragged apart and drowned in shouting, for closing that gap, Skye remembered all too well. No doubt, Jemma did too. But not here. Not ever again.) 

“Jem.”

Skye cut her off midway through explaining something about how the muscles in a giraffe’s neck helped them to swallow. Jemma bit her lip, and her eyes drifted slowly down to the fluffy grey blanket between them. It formed a small but empty expanse; a space that she longed to close, but dared not. Not after what had happened to Skye the last time. 

But then Skye lifted the blanket, and Jemma’s body was drawn to hers like a magnet, pulling together automatically to fill the cold space. 

“That’s more like it,” Skye insisted, snuggling into Jemma with extra gusto to help make her point. “Now that we’re here, there never has to be space between us again, okay?” 

“Except after 9pm on school nights,” Jemma put in. 

“What?” 

“It’s on the fridge.”

Skye laughed, and kissed Jemma’s hair. Jemma hummed contentedly, and leaned into her embrace. They turned their eyes back to the screen, where a baby giraffe was struggling to navigate its own gangly limbs. Skye nudged Jemma, remembering a question on the topic she’d had some unknown time ago. 

“Hey, you’re a biologist, right?” she joked, and before Jemma could jab back at her, followed it up with her question; “Why are giraffes’ tongues black?”

Just like that Jemma’s glare was gone and she was back to Fun Fact Jemma Mode, which always made Skye smile – especially now, as Jemma was already trying to gesture with her hands, despite their being preoccupied with holding Skye’s under the blanket.

“Well,” Jemma said, “funny you should ask...”


End file.
